you slouch into the passenger seat of your dad’s station wagon and absorb the wisdom of a Baptist preacher. His words search for you
across radiowaves; vibrations find your bony body
in the back roads of the lowcountry.
He (this preacher) speaks in certainties (American degeneracy)
and warns you of nefarious practices / these the acts of the archetypal sinner
—the homosexual; the sodomite.
He this preacher feeds you tales of a vengeful God
(you haven’t met this God)
a God who christens you with foreign epithets: unnatural, depraved, despised.
you roll these words around on your tongue // syllables stuck in your braces
you learn God hates you, you rebellious creature,
cast from that paradise of promise,
abjection now forms the contours of your finitude
—thus saith the Lord! // so at fifteen
Death gives you a call.
at nineteen, you call him back.
and every moment
in between you spend
begging God to keep you from calling,
begging God to love you,
begging—God doesn’t appear
in the absence of the One you’ve known – an absence,
no, a disparate presence – an apparition! // a lover calls.
he appears as specters do.
you haven’t spoken in a while.
still, he wraps his words around you
to say for the first time (which is the last time)
“I love you.”
to be loved in the presence of death: salvation.
that’s what I wish you had known, my darling.
I wish you had known salvation.
for one day a lover will waltz into your tomb and insist on resurrection:
that love as fierce as death will reach into your gut
and pull roses from your intestines // it will hurt, my love, it will sting
but you will be becoming whole.
stay here // in your becoming
stay with me. I am terrified of losing you
to the seduction of despair // do not
entertain such longings // spit them out //
release from your imagination the trappings of
a world which demands your death.
refuse them with the lineage of sinners who
survived long before
your arrival in this kind of life
for queer life, my darling, this life
will reveal to you salvation.
it is wholly imperfect but can
hold the glorious impossibility that is you.
with pansies planted in your pupils,
you will refuse the seductions of a despairing world,
for you will bloom, my darling, you will bloom.
you will live.
